The research community has contributed advances in a variety of scientific fields, including medicine, computing, amongst several others. To contribute to advances in a particular field, a researcher must have a considerable amount of knowledge pertaining to that field. Conventionally, the researcher locates a research document that may be of interest through conducting a search, for example. The researcher then determines whether a particular research document is of particular interest by reviewing the title of the research document as well as the abstract of the research document. If the researcher, based on the title and abstract, feels that the research document is germane to the research interests of the researcher, then the researcher will read the entirety of the located research document.
It can be ascertained that the field of interest to the researcher can include numerous research documents written by many different authors. Accordingly, the researcher can spend a significant amount of time searching for research documents of interest. Author-generated summaries (abstracts) of a research document, however, may be misleading as to the impact of the research document over time. Therefore, a researcher may spend an inordinate amount of time reading research documents that are not of interest to the particular field of the researcher. Further, at the time of authorship of a research document, the author may not correctly predict the impact of certain disclosures of the research document. In other words, the author may feel, at the time of authorship, that a particular portion of the research document is the focal point of the research document. Over time, however, another portion of the research document may have a greater impact in a particular field. Thus, a subsequent researcher is unable to quickly locate this portion without reading the entirety of the research document.
To assist researchers in quickly locating research documents that may be of interest to a researcher, systems have been developed that generate author graphs, which visually indicates to a researcher which authors are often co-authors on research documents. Therefore, for example, the researcher can ascertain that a first author co-authors with a second author relatively frequently, thereby informing the researcher that such researcher may also be interested in other research documents authored by the second author.